Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2000
Ukrainian Thespian Saminin Becomes The Toast of Shenyang in Pavel Show
By LESLIE CHANG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SHENYANG, China-Backstage at the taping of a television variety show in
this northern steel town, Andrei Saminin sneaks out for a cigarette.
Someone shouts "It's Pavel!" and suddenly teenagers, old couples, even
the studio's security guards are clamoring for autographs of the
Ukrainian actor who plays Pavel Korchagin, the fictional hero of a TV
series running here (and dubbed into Chinese) called "How Steel Is Forged."
"People told me I was popular in China, but I never imagined it would be
like this," says a bemused Mr. Saminin, whose wavy locks and soulful
eyes make him a sort of East bloc Shaun Cassidy.
Meet China's latest media phenom: Pavel Korchagin, a mythical Soviet
railway worker who has been brought back by propagandists to preach
struggle and sacrifice to a new generation. In an age of media overload,
Pavel enjoys enviable recognition: 97% of young people are aware of him,
according to a recent poll, and Chinese President Jiang Zemin is said to
be a fan. The 26-year-old Mr. Saminin-who back home in Kiev is an
obscure theater actor-has been mobbed at every stop of a two-week
national tour to promote his series. He once had to be evacuated from a
sidewalk crush by security guards fearful for his safety.
A propaganda victory? Not exactly. China's state-run media have indeed
worked overtime to promote the railway worker who labored so devotedly
in service of the Russian Revolution. Working through the Ukrainian
winter, the story goes, he contracted typhus, was shot in the head, went
blind and became paralyzed. But for a young audience fixated on
consumerism and celebrity, Pavel has morphed into the newest star on
China's variety-show circuit, where the man who portrays him does
interviews, plays the guitar, sings and dances.
"We should all learn from the Pavel spirit," says Yi Mi, a 17-year-old
in suede platform shoes who has come to the TV studio to add the star's
autograph to her collection. Asked to elaborate, she ponders for a while
and says, "We learned it in the seventh grade, but we've already
forgotten it. But Pavel is so handsome, don't you think?"
How did Pavel get so far off-message? For China's older generation, many
of them Soviet-educated, veneration of the heroic Pavel is real enough
and steeped in nostalgia for what they recall as a simpler time.
Generations of schoolchildren who grew up under Mao devoured the
purportedly true Pavel tale in textbooks and comic-book versions. The
author of the novel "How Steel Is Forged," Nikolai Ostrovsky, was feted
by Josef Stalin and the book took off in China during the 1950s, when
the two nations shared aspirations of spreading Communism around the
globe.
Now after a two-decade hiatus, Pavel is enjoying a second coming in
China- never mind that worker unity is dead and poverty distinctly
unfashionable. The 20-part "How Steel Is Forged" has aired twice on
national TV and is now being unrolled on provincial stations across the
country. A Beijing middle school plans to revive "Pavel classes" for
elite students who exemplify the "Pavel Spirit." "To learn from Pavel
and Bill Gates is no contradiction," intones a recent newspaper editorial.
"From Pavel we can understand the value of human life, and from Gates
a spirit of emphasizing science and technology," the editors concluded.
"In today's materialistic society, we need spiritual heroes," says Han
Gang, the show's director, sitting in a Beijing teahouse with his mobile
phone and his Mild Seven Japanese cigarettes on the table before him.
Then he sighs and admits,
"A lot of young people say to me, 'Pavel is so silly, he just thinks
about struggle and doesn't worry about money.' "
That has forced Pavel to navigate a surreal region that is part Marxist
propaganda and part tacky game show. On the set of the variety show,
Mr. Saminin sings Pavel's trademark paean to a dying Red Army soldier
("The heart of the Communist Youth League is beating, Tell my lover this
sacrifice was for the workers") against a backdrop of flashing lights,
eruptions of dry-ice fog, and a massive billboard urging viewers to
drink Huishan Milk, a sponsor of the show. He joins a dance medley with
young women in purple tutus, fends off questions from the show's hostess
about a possible romance with his co-star, and spins a makeshift wheel
of fortune to win "a platinum diamond ring worth 2,000 yuan!" The ring,
in less exciting words, is worth about $240.
Little lip service is paid to the Pavel myth. After Mr. Saminin delivers
the hero's deathbed monologue about his great struggle to liberate
mankind, host Wang Ping asks whether the show has aired in Ukraine yet.
"It still needs Chinese approval," says Mr. Saminin. "Oh, then it's a
question of money," jokes Mr. Wang. The series is entirely a Chinese
production, with Chinese financing, though it was filmed in Ukraine with
Ukrainian actors.
Small wonder, then, that young people today are confused about what
Pavel stands for. Stripped of his central goal of liberating the masses,
the modern-day Pavel is a perfect stand-in for today's Chinese Communist
Party, which continues to preach class struggle even as it promotes
capitalism.
Money has a lot to do with Pavel's latest reincarnation. The idea to
remake "How Steel Is Forged"-which was made into three film versions in
the former Soviet Union, most recently in the 1970s-came last year from
an unlikely quarter: China Vanke Co., a property developer in the
country's richest city, Shenzhen, which has a film-production unit. "The
major Chinese emperors have all been done, but no one has done Pavel,"
explains Sun Jing, a Vanke executive.
The Shenzhen propaganda bureau loved the idea, and in league with China
Central Television lined up $1.3 million in investment. Profiting off
Pavel has since run rampant. Organizers of the National Games for the
Disabled got Mr. Saminin to appear at a Shanghai event earlier this
month-after all, Pavel is paralyzed by the end of the novel. Publishing
houses have issued competing editions of "How Steel Is Forged,"
including a version for children illustrated with scenes from the TV
show.
Yet if Pavel has gone Hollywood, that is largely by design. In the
original book, Pavel's romance with Tonia, the beautiful daughter of a
wealthy official, founders on the shoals of class conflict. As a child
of capitalists, Tonia scorns Pavel's lowly worker status. He joins the
Bolsheviks and defeats enemies of the revolution in stirring battle
scenes.
In the current TV version, the lovers are separated by war but meet up
again at the end, where Tonia has named her young son Pavel.
Translation: She has never stopped loving him, class-consciousness be
damned. Pavel also rejects the violent tactics of his Red Army cohorts
in putting down an uprising in Kiev, dealt with in passing in the novel
but expanded to fill two TV episodes. And Pavel has taken up other
modern issues, including the evils of smoking and sexual harassment.
"We've watered down the class-consciousness and made him more of a
human-rights figure that everyone can relate to," says director Mr. Han,
who rewrote about two-thirds of the original book for the TV version.
"We are at the end of the 20th century. You can't look at things in the
old narrow way."
Write to Leslie Chang at leslie.chang {AT} wsj.com1
Calin Dan
Rozengracht 105/D4
NL-1016 LV Amsterdam
T: + 31 (0)20 770 1432
F: + 31 (0)20 623 7760
e-mail: calin {AT} euronet.nl
http://www.v2.nl/v2-lab/hd
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